She felt goosebumps on her arms. Her scalp stiffened with something primordial.
Help! We need help.
She pulled the phone from her pocket and punched in 9-1-1. Her limbs trembled. When she heard a woman’s voice, she begged between hyperventilating breaths. “My parents,” she said. “There was a crash. The car…”
The dispatch operator confirmed the address. “Stay on the line with me,” she told Orchid. “Emergency services should be there in minutes.”
She drew closer, desperate to do something.
The woods echoed their silence. The only sound was the spattering sleet that covered everything around her.
Shards of ice pelted her face and her nightgown, now a sheet of ice, clung to her legs. She suddenly remembered how her parents had joked that the steep descent from the road to their house was their insurance to keep trick-or-treaters away, and they were left with all those Halloween sweets for themselves.
As she neared, hazard lights flickered, momentarily illuminating crumpled blue metal, and then plunging the toothless grille into darkness. She tried to make sense of googly-eyed headlights. One angled up to illuminate gnarled limbs of trees, their branches grasping towards the wreckage like twisted fingers. The other pointed down, an oblong light marking the spot for a grave.
Then the smell reached her. She gagged as oil and gas and brake fluid stung her nose. The smoking engine cautioned her with a hiss. It was quiet except for tiny daggers of ice hitting ice. Too quiet. “Mom? Dad!” She moaned, slipping up the icy surface. The car crumpled around a felled tree at the hairpin turn that always seemed like murder on her bike.
This is the place she should’ve stopped. Heeded the warnings of the spitting hoses, grasping branches and the wandering eye of a mangled headlight. If she had paused, she could’ve saved herself seeing the red spray. The driver’s door yawed open. Her dad usually insisted on driving, even if he’d been the one to drink.
The front of the car was compressed as if the engine had been chopped off. The hood folded like a tin lid. Her father’s torso ejected from the front windshield to lie on the hood as if a crash test dummy. The hazards strobed a pale gleam, lighting the space where his thighs bent like a puppeteer’s, crimson streaks creeping over their limp surface.
Orchid screamed and slipped nearer, then circled away in terror. What to do? CPR? Apply pressure to wounds? Sirens sounded in the distance. She reeled in panic, unable to either snatch air or expel it.
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Tonight’s nightmare twisted. Her father lifted his mangled head to turn towards her, one eye bulbous and purple, crimson creeping below both nostrils. His neck snapped at an improbable angle at his Adam’s apple, he barked at her. “Your fault.”
Orchid suddenly awake, her chest constricted, her cheeks wet. Reality returned to her consciousness. She was not twelve. She was twenty-seven, forged by struggles, determination, and triumphs.
She sat up in bed.
She could still remember her aunt’s spotted hand on her shoulder when she brought her home to pack her things.
Using Orchid’s Chinese name, she said, “Take what you need, Lan Hua.”
She couldn’t help it. She had to unload the worst of it. “I’m really sorry, auntie. It was me. I was on the phone with them, right before they were driving down the scary part. I didn’t even have time to put down salt.”
“Just an accident,” her aunt said.
Her mother’s sister’s mouth was pursed tight. Orchid understood her expression of blame. Her aunt hadn’t disagreed with her self-indictment.
During her teenage years, she found that being pretty hid her blight. She grew into her oversized hazel eyes, and her long legs were an attraction. Her skirts got shorter, her heels higher, her look more daring. When she blackened her lash line and straightened her hair, she looked mature enough to slip into clubs with her older, leather-clad boyfriends.
And then college, where she met Mandy in her assigned dorm room. She opened the door to find a pretty blond unpacking neatly folded underwear into one of the dressers. When she pushed back her perky bob turned to face Orchid, everything about her was soft. Her rounded cheeks, button nose, smooth forehead and curvy body looked as though a potter had smoothed away every sharp angle. Cotton candy to her sour sucker.
That moment was when Orchid’s new life, her new world, began.
“You must be Orchid!” she said. Orchid dumped her duffle bags onto the industrial carpeting, then swung the door shut behind her. “Yup, and you must be Mandy.” They shook hands and Orchid started to unpack. Mandy handed her a box of wet wipes. “I haven’t had a chance to clean the shelves—who knows how dusty they are!” She wrinkled her nose. Mandy looked like the type who’d brought pearls.
“Worse, maybe guys lived here last. You know, freshmen guys, the ones who smoke weed instead of going to class, and pee into Pringles cans when they’re too lazy to go down the hall to the urinal.”
Mandy grabbed a wet wipe and scrubbed the surface of her dresser. “Ugh, I hope not. Aren’t Pringles cans cardboard? Wouldn’t they disintegrate? I’m kind of a neat freak,” she said.
Orchid joined her and wiped the closet shelf. “I like things clean too.” She hung the rest of her things, pushing them to one side to leave half the space empty for Mandy.
During the years they roomed together, Mandy bolstered Orchid each time she dated another unreliable type.
“It’s me,” Orchid groaned.
